Cognitive Edge. Khan on Forage v Farm. Razib Khan on foragers vs. farmers: Cultures which are the most developed and least developed have the most equitable relations between the genders, while those in the middle are generally more conventionally male-dominated. … Plough farming societies tend to be more patriarchal [than hoe societies], all things equal. … Immigrants to the United States impart to their descendants the same values. … The majority of the world’s population are no longer primary producers, but most are recent descendants of primary producers.
Ultimately this goes back to the foragers & farmers debate. The above is a rather materialist economic reading of power relations. One could create a narrative of moral evolution over time, and the expansion of the arc of humanity with the spread of universal religions. I think the two variables are related, and in any case the description of what happened remains the same.
We should not proliferate categories beyond what is needed. Sound familiar? The Collapse of Complex Business Models. I gave a talk last year to a group of TV executives gathered for an annual conference. From the Q&A after, it was clear that for them, the question wasn’t whether the internet was going to alter their business, but about the mode and tempo of that alteration. Against that background, though, they were worried about a much more practical matter: When, they asked, would online video generate enough money to cover their current costs? That kind of question comes up a lot. It’s a tough one to answer, not just because the answer is unlikely to make anybody happy, but because the premise is more important than the question itself. There are two essential bits of background here. The first is that most TV is made by for-profit companies, and there are two ways to generate a profit: raise revenues above expenses, or cut expenses below revenues.
The other is that, for many media business, that second option is unreachable. Here’s why. The ‘and them some’ is what causes the trouble. Dr. Valence Theory of Organization / FrontPage. The Pirate Wheel. This is a first attempt to outline the Privacy spoke of The Pirate Wheel. It will certainly change over time, but this is a first stake in the ground. The Pirate Ideology is a new ideology that centers around the power over information, and gives it to the citizens, forcing a transparent government. This is one of the eight spokes. Privacy means that everybody has the right to have her life to herself. Privacy of Body: Your body is yours, and you have the right to do with it what you like. Privacy of Correspondence: What you discuss with other people, when, how, and from where is something between you and them, and only between you and them.
Privacy of Data: The bit patterns on your computer, laptop, pad, phone, and other devices is a private matter for you. Privacy of Economy: Your assets, inflow of funds and outflow of funds are for you to know. Privacy of Identity: You have the right to be anonymous in all daily matters and as you go about your day. Solitude and Leadership: an article by William Deresiewicz | The American Scholar. Essays - Spring 2010 Print If you want others to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts By William Deresiewicz The lecture below was delivered to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point in October 2009.
My title must seem like a contradiction. What can solitude have to do with leadership? Leadership is what you are here to learn—the qualities of character and mind that will make you fit to command a platoon, and beyond that, perhaps, a company, a battalion, or, if you leave the military, a corporation, a foundation, a department of government. We need to begin by talking about what leadership really means. So I began to wonder, as I taught at Yale, what leadership really consists of. See, things have changed since I went to college in the ’80s. So what I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers. That is exactly what places like Yale mean when they talk about training leaders. So, back to the novel.
Why Self-Organized Networks Will Destroy Hierarchies — A Credo by Kevin Carson. As originally posted: Center for a Stateless Society on October 6, 2010. Kevin Carson: “Hierarchies are systematically stupid and inefficient, for the following reasons. 1. Hayekian information problems: The people in authority who make the rules interfere with the people who know how to do the job and are in direct contact with the situation. The people who make the rules know nothing about the work they’re interfering with. The people who make the rules are unaccountable to the people who do know how to do the work. Consequently, all authority-based rules create suboptimal results and irrationality when they interfere with the judgment of those in direct contact with the situation. People in authority make stupid decisions because the people who know more than they do are their subordinates, and the only people who can hold them accountable know even less than they do. 2.
Hierarchies also systematically suppress critical thinking ability in their members. 3. Hospitals are a good example.
Break Free from Our Systems Prison. As a worker cooperator I have struggled for years to use 'normal' management techniques in worker co-ops. Often they don't work. Members don't like them even when they have agreed a business plan, they feel oppressed and trapped by their own agreements. The biggest problem has been strategic development.
While 'normal' operational (next week) and tactical (next year) management 'best practices' are ok, I have never seen or experienced a 'normal' strategic development method being successful in a worker co-op in the UK. After several years of searching I think I may have found the reason. 'Normal' management methods are fundamentally unsuited to our open, egalitarian cultures. Indeed at their core, they are designed to suppress workers and privilege the vested interests of their controllers.So, you say, we knew that, but the depth of this ideology is the surprise. This idea is revolutionary. What do we do? Redundancy Efficiency Creativity. For centuries human organisations and endeavours have sought to be efficient, to use as few resources as possible to achieve the ends desired.
It is the number one goal in 20th century management theory, underpinning that whole systems theory based ideology. But what if this was just a symptom of an age of scarcity? In nature, biological systems are rarely efficient in the way that Ansoff (the father of strategic management) or Taylor (of scientific management fame) would recognise.
Millions of sperm but only one 'succeeds' to use 20th century thinking. Gazillions of bacteria, if they all succesfully reproduced we would be buried under mountains of them. It is the reproduction costs that have caused our obession with 'efficiency'. If the reproduction cost of a book is several years of a monk's life, you want efficiency. Think about this. What is the advantage of this? In practice, the evidence of the effectiveness of these games is slight. Humans have spent many years avoiding this. Valence Theory of Organization / Effective Theory. In an earlier chapter, I describe how Inter Pares considers the issue of scaling and growth, and suggest this comparison between BAH and UCaPP organizations: With BAH organizations, effectiveness is measured in terms of owned or controlled resources that are deployed in the pursuit of defined objectives and goals.
UCaPP organizations, it seems, feel a lesser need to control or own the means – including people – that enable the creation and dissemination of its intended effects which are based in shared values and participation in common cause. In a contemporary context, it is appropriate to question whether the traditional construction of organizational effectiveness – having to do with access and deployment of resources, or achievement of stated goals and objectives, or combinations of both – provides the most useful guidance for a UCaPP world. …is itself transforming, that is changing the innovator as he or she seeks to change the world. Sensory Revision. Education: Uncertainty Isn't the Only Risk. Yesterday I gave a talk at the Snoqualmie Valley School District Foundation fundraising luncheon.
My role was to help them envision the future of education. Some of the comments I made yesterday will be relevant to the scenarios we build on this blog. As an avid anti-futurist, I said I didn't know what education would look like, but that I was tracking how many of its attributes might play out. That said, there are some things I feel very strongly about, regardless of the future. Learning How to Learn With technology evolving at an exponential rate, and with it the rise of new industries; and with ever more of the planet's human population bumping into each other in cyberspace, if not directly connecting to one another through social media, the ability to learn new things will be important. Transliteracy People will need to know how to effectively communicate in various media. Uncertainties Conclusion Uncertainties may unfold in any of the ways suggested above.
Swarm Intelligence versus Production Line Repression. Networks not Processes This article is about how we can choose different structures and organisation. What do we want? We dont have to accept just the one way of organising that is on offer. Modern internet era IT enables new forms of organisation. Once it was only possible to control linear processes of production with a limited networking capability outside those production lines. The Ford era production line is the idea with suppliers feeding in from the sides (a simple 'network'). Fordist thinking underpins all manner of production today, not just cars but data handling, call centres, restaurants, hospitals and service providers, even solicitors, teachers, doctors and other professionals have been Fordised (? The internet and the communications technology we now have has enabled greatly enhanced networking inside organisation to the point where the concept of 'a production line' business process can disappear.
Organisation based on swarm intelligence is different. State or market? what links red star, cybersyn and flower market? « nights of labour. One of the arguments which underpin the previous posts on Red Star, Cybersyn and Flower Market, yet are not explicitly stated is that socialist reconfigurations should be free enough to use state and market instruments alike. In this post I will try to better formulate this argument in this post by deriving insights from Rough Theory and Hack the State ( and While neoliberalism praises free markets, the contrasting memory of real socialism points out to central planning as the main driving force to organise an otherwise anarchic economic life. Historical insight and multiplicity of communist possibilities rectify this over-simplification: Planning has become an important component of different periods and contexts of capitalist development; whereas socialism does not inherently require centralised state planning, especially with the availability of complex information technologies.
Like this: Like Loading... Dynamic and Non-linear Theory of Institutional Emergence. There are five ways of organising: the hierarchical, the egalitarian, the individualistic, the fatalistic and the autonomous. Each approach is a way of disorganising the other four: without the other four, it would have nothing to organise itself against. In Organising and Disorganising, Michael Thompson gives a detailed explanation of the dynamics of these five fundamental arrangements that underlie 'Cultural Theory'.
We may believe that our perspective is the right one and that any interaction with opposing views is a messy and unwelcome contradiction. So why should egalitarians engage with individualists, or hierachists with egalitarians? Blurbs .. about 'Organising and Disorganising' Beyond boom and bust - diagrams. Swinging between the regulations of government and the excesses of the market has proven flaws, says Michael Thompson. Here he outlines how cultural theory can offer a new economic paradigm "It’s déja vu all over again," Yogi Berra once declared, and many of those who have now experienced the credit crunch and its subsequent financial and economic turmoil will be inclined to agree with him.
In the 1980s, Arthur Seldon, the founder of Britain’s staunchly (some might say rabidly) pro-market Institute of Economic Affairs, conceded that there was one worthwhile task to which its rival and newly opened think tank - the left-of-centre Institute for Public Policy Research - should address itself. Privatisation, he said (in a letter to The Independent), had been the great and unqualified triumph of the preceding decade but even he had to admit that, when everything that could successfully be privatised had been privatised, a limit would have been reached. Further reading list. Cultural Theory with Michael Thompson. Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self and Emotion (9780521318310): Richard A. Shweder, Robert A. LeVine. Theory of Governance - Organising and Disorganising. Book: Organising and Disorganising: A Dynamic and Non-Linear Theory of Institutional Emergence and its Implications.
Dr Michael Thompson. Triarchy Press, 2008. We introduced this book last week, but would like to return to it, given its importance. The following two items are a summary of the argument by the author, and a review by Tudor Rickards, Professor of Creativity and Organisational Change at Manchester University. I also recommend the discussion at Triarchy Press, which is applied to the current financial meltdown. 1. Michael Thompson: “In the highly argumentative process that led to the siting of Arsenal Football Club’s new stadium, all the actors – the market actor (Arsenal), the hierarchical actor (Islington Council) and the egalitarian actor (the Highbury Community Association) – were able to make themselves heard. 2. Tudor Rickards: “complex systems have what he calls solidarities each favoured by some people involved. Thompson’s solution is to add a fifth element. Consumer Culture Theory. CCT - PDF (Open in new Tab)
Culture-Theory - PDF (open in new frame) A muddled model? A view of the Big Society. The Big Society concept is under fire. Harriet Riley argues the concept promises exciting possibilities for volunteer organisations and explores some of its implications for the charity sector. If the government’s Big Society narrative survives the current onslaught, it could provide opportunities for developing new ways of delivering services, and the promotion of innovative and collaborative working practices. At the practical level, however, there is a great deal of confusion – and a degree of negativity – around the idea in some areas of the voluntary sector, probably reflecting what is being felt in many local authorities.
There seems to be a lack of support and guidance – either from central government, or locally – on what is being asked of these organisations. The RSA’s Jonathan Rowson’s provides a useful analogy for how many at the front line feel: a pressure to try to build some kind of bucolic idyll against a savage landscape of cuts is discomfiting. Leadership and the Local Peak Syndrome « Leaders We Deserve. Theory U and Theory T.